Vaknin, you plonker, look it up.
If the narcissist is truly an absence, if there's nobody there, if there's no core identity, no self, no ego, if it's just one huge void, an emptiness, a black hole. Who is doing the talking? Who is doing the acting? Who is doing the analyzing? Who is throwing the garbage? The trash.
Okay, Shoshanim, I'm here to answer all these questions.
And the answer is a program. You do not need self-awareness or consciousness or a soul or a self or an ego or any of these things in order to act in ways which appear to be intelligent and sentient.
Just look at your smartphone. It performs many functions. Just look at artificial intelligence. It can deceive you into believing that you're talking to a human being and yet no one would claim that artificial intelligence is possessed of a self or that your smartphone has an ego, except of course, if it is an iPhone. No one would say this because these are not relevant to performance, to executive functions.
An entity can perform a multiplicity of functions, can even act in ways which would pass the Turing test. In other words, in ways which would convince you that this entity is conscious, sentient, intelligent and even human when actually it is not.
So the narcissist is a program. It's a code. It's like coding, you know. It's like a software, piece of software, a computer program and it runs on the computer that is a brain.
And so the narcissist is able to perfectly mimic and simulate a human being that does not make the narcissist a human being, a true one, der echte. The narcissist is a results human being.
Now, when you don't have empathy, when you don't have access to positive emotions, when you're unable to tell the difference between external and internal, when you perceive other people as avatars, introjects, not real, extensions, figments of your imagination, elements, internal objects in your mind, you're not human in most senses of the word.
You're a good, you engage in good mimicry. You mimic a human being very well, but it doesn't make you a human being.
In the future, 50 years from now, we're going to have robots, androids who would be utterly indistinguishable from human beings. Watch the movie Blade Runner, the first one, utterly indistinguishable.
And yet these androids would not qualify as human beings. They may constitute a different species. They may even possess real intelligence, and they may even develop consciousness of some kind, but no one would ever say that they're human beings.
And people react. When they're in the presence of a supreme, superb, impeccable simulation of a human being, they react with extreme acute discomfort. This is known as the uncanny valley reaction, I've dealt with it in multiple videos.
But how does the narcissist succeed to mislead you to this extent? How does this programmed simulation succeed to convince you that it is not a simulation, that it is not a problem, that there's a real human being there, a real person?
What are the techniques behind this success? What are the sources of this ability to pull the wool over your eye, to kind of deceive you or mislead you or direct you into beliefs that are counterfactual? They're not factual, they defy reality.
In short, how the narcissist induces in you a state of delusion, or even I would say hallucination, almost driving you clinically speaking into psychosis.
When you're confronted with the narcissist, gradually you begin to come to believe that the narcissist is a human being, a flawed human being, a problematic human being, a dysfunctional human being, an obnoxious one, but a human being all the same.
This is an amazing sleight of hand. It's amazing piece of magic.
The narcissist is not a human being and doesn't have the prerequisites, the minimum prerequisites to pass any test as a human being.
I'm not talking about intelligence, because intelligence is not limited to human beings. Let it be clear. Executive capacity is not limited to human beings. The ability to decide and to act upon one's decisions is not limited to human beings. These are all common to machinery, to human beings, to other species and so on and so forth.
This is not what constitutes human beings. This is not what makes human beings human.
And yet the narcissist succeeds to deceive the vast majority of people.
How does he do that?
In several ways.
Number one, he triggers in you, interjects.
Using the process known as entraining, the narcissist synchronizes his mind with yours using verbal cues. It could be verbal abuse, for example. The repetition of certain sentences and statements and words in precise combinations synchronizes the brainwaves of the narcissist with yours.
And this is not a metaphor. I'm talking about reality. This phenomenon is well-recognized in neuroscience. It's called entraining.
So then your brain and his brain become one. And he's able to tap into your brain and activate within your mind, interjects, voices.
And having triggered these interjects, having activated these voices, the narcissist becomes identified with them. You misidentify the narcissist with interjects that he had triggered.
In addition to that, the narcissist installs in your mind his own interject, his own voice, which usually accompanies you for the rest of your days, unless you seek treatment and help.
So at some point, these voices inside your head, these interjects, they acquire a life of their own. They are felt as real and even as external.
The narcissist's ability to trigger in you internal processes, which are highly dynamic and highly energetic, makes him feel real to you, renders him, this ability renders him real.
So the first impediment is down. Now you have reached a conclusion that the narcissist is a real person or at the very least a real organism of some kind, a real entity.
The reality of the narcissist is substantiated by the impact that the narcissist has on your mind.
You say to yourself, had the narcissist not existed in a meaningful way, he would have never had this impact on me.
But that's of course nonsense because artificial intelligence programs can have an impact on you. Machines, robots and so on can have an impact on you. Sex dolls can have an impact on you. It is very natural disasters. Nature itself can have an impact on you. Everything inanimate and inanimate, your pets, your dog, your cat, even Netflix can have an impact on you.
The fact that something has an impact on your mind doesn't make it either real or human, at least not in the tangible sense and not in the philosophical sense.
So that the narcissist has an impact on you simply means that his program is well written, well executed, well compiled and glitch and bug free in this sense.
The narcissist is a predator and he prays on your mind that's his raw material, that's his food, that's his prey.
You know I've seen a movie, I don't remember which, where the predator said, the predator was killing people and he said I like to play with my food before I eat it. That's a narcissist.
Now, second reason, you mistake the narcissist for a real entity for a human being.
The narcissist enters your mind as I said and then he assembles on the fly elements from your mind and from your psyche. He recombines you, he reorganizes the furniture inside your living room, your mental living room. He recreates your psychology and it is so kaleidoscopic, so improvised and extemporaneous, so unpredictable, so disturbing that you begin tosurrender to this external locus of control.
The longer the narcissist plays around with the elements and figments and ingredients and components of your mind, the more familiar he feels. You know, familiar like in demonology and black magic and so on and so forth, he becomes familiar and he becomes familiar, which is inside your mind all the time, playing around, rearranging things, reframing things, divorcing you from reality more and more extensively and incrementally and so on and so forth.
Ultimately he becomes a presence or an entity that you're used to, that you're familiar with, that you feel at home with. He becomes home in effect.
And finally the narcissist uses what is known as an attribution error.
We tend to attribute behaviors to essences. We say this guy behaves wickedly because he is evil and this guy or this girl is altruistic and charitable and kind because that's who she is.
We misidentify actions and behaviors with identity and essence. We say people behave the way they do. They make decisions and choices. They act the way they do because of who they are, not because they're stimulated by the environment, not because they're in receipt of environmental cues, not because they are coerced maybe to act the way they do, not because they have no other choice, but because that's who they are.
And this is known as attribution error. We act the way we do because we are rational creatures, we process information, we make learned, well-informed decisions. Others act the way they do because that's who they are. They can't help it. We can help it. They cannot help it.
The same goes when you're confronted with a narcissist. You attribute his behaviors to his inner core, to his inner identity, to his inner essence, not to the environment, not to the shared fantasy.
So then you say his behaviors, his choices, his decisions, his actions are strongly indicative that this is who he is.
In other words, in other words, there is an inner core, that there is an essence, there is somebody there, there is someone there. He's not empty. It's not true. He is not empty because he acts, he behaves, he makes choices, he makes decisions. That means that his essence dictates how he manifests, how he expresses himself, how he behaves. And so that means he has an essence.
So this is attribution error.
Narcissists are machines programmed to react in highly specific, fantastic ways to the environment, environmental cues, environmental stimuli to the outside. They react to the outside by internalizing it, by converting it to internal objects and internal representations, but they're still fully programmed by the environment, by external cues, by external stimuli, by external information, by data from the outside. Everything emanates from the outside, including narcissistic supply, which comes from the outside and allows the narcissist to maintain the precarious balance of his internal barren wasteland of a landscape. Everything comes from the outside.
Narcissists are totally outside determined, even has an external locus of control. He tends to blame people. If he does something wrong, if he fails, he would blame people and say, "They hate me, they envy me, they sabotage me." So it's all outside, ironically.
And so attribution error.
When you see a robot picking a ball, does it imply that the robot has a soul or a psyche or a self or an ego? Of course not. And if the robot were to slap you, would that imply that the robot is angry or that there is a robot soul or a robot psyche or a robot something that has made this decision? No, it would imply simply that the robot is programmed to act this way.
Now programming could be highly complex. Programming could yield unexpected behaviors and outcomes, notreducible to the code, not detectable in the program, but it's still a program.
Never mind how complex the emergent phenomena are, no matter how complex the emergent behaviors, the epi-epi phenomena, the complexity of the emergent behaviors is not proof that there's somebody there, there's someone there. It's just proof that the program is well written and has a lot of leeway in degrees of freedom, which generate hyper complex behaviors that cannot be directly traced to the program.
But programmed machines do not have souls. They do not have psyches. They don't have core identities. There's nobody there. It's a void, an emptiness, an essence of code.
That's a narcissist and his ability to mislead you into believing otherwise is because he invades your mind. He colonizes your mind. He triggers you from the inside and that makes you feel real.
And then he reassembles you and reorganizes you and reframes you and recreates you on the fly and that makes him feel familiar.
And then he displays complex behaviors, choices and decision making, highly intelligent sometimes, and then gives you the impression that there is someone there. There is a core. There is an entity. There is an existence, a presence when actually it's an absence. It's a program well written in the sense that it yields unpredictable behaviors and choices, not traceable back to the program.
What is this problem?
After all, the abuse, the early childhood abuse and trauma coupled probably with the genetic predisposition of the narcissist have created the narcissist, have programmed the narcissist. The narcissist is the outcome of abuse and trauma as forms of programming.